Good for Obama, obviously, but I wish he'd talk like he's willing to go to the mat for it, be willing to lose his job over closing it by force of his powers as CIC, or it won't mean very much. He'll send an anonymous drone to kill who the hell knows who on the other side of the globe, but he won't challenge congress to stop him from ordering Gitmo's closure. It's a POW camp, he's CIC. Play it out and let the right have to defend keeping our gulag on an island nation already living under tyranny. It's like renting Siberia prison camp space from the Soviets. Except, you know, the rent is replaced with weird military occupation. Get creative, imaginative.

Oh wait, those don't exist in American politics.

"I promise I'm going to renew my efforts" is not the same as "here's my plan - let's get this done."

How many of the current detainee population are being held in spite of their having been found to have been taken into custody erroneously?  

How many of them are there only because we refuse to send them back to their home countries?  

Does he really intend that all of the detainees must be tried in US courts - even those they know shouldn't have been there in the first place - before they have any hope of being repatriated?  

What if a detainee they know to be innocent ends up being convicted?  

How is it okay to repatriate detainees after a civilian acquittal, but not now?

Now, Obama does need Congress' help to close Gitmo. He needs Congress' help (though didn't, when Eric Holder initially decided to try the 9/11 plotters in NY) to try the actual terrorists in civilian courts, to get them in Florence SuperMax in cells down the hall from Faisal Shahzad and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, whom he cites.

But most of the detainees at Gitmo won't ever be tried in civilian courts, either because they were tortured so badly they couldn't be tried without also admitting we tortured them (and, presumably, try the torturers), or because we don't have a case against them.

Trying detainees who don't pose a threat in civilian courts won't solve the problem as they're not guilty of any crime.

Moreover, Obama dodges what his Administration has done himself to keep detainees in Gitmo, notably the moratorium on transferring detainees to Yemen and the appeals of Latif and Uthman's habeas cases so as to have the legal right to keep people based solely on associations and obviously faulty intelligence documents.

Obama doesn't mention that part of Gitmo's legacy. Obama says 10 years have elapsed and we should be able to move beyond the fear keeping men at Gitmo.

3 years have elapsed since he issued the moratorium on Yemeni transfers; 19 months have elapsed since he killed Anwar al-Awlaki, purportedly (though not really) the big threat in Yemen. It's time to move on in Yemen, as well as generally.

Link

I guess he really didn't "want" to.

He doesn't want to.  He wants to change the subject from the awful start he's had to his second term.